


Chez les bêtes

by breathedout



Series: Unreal Cities [3]
Category: Historical RPF, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Accidental Voyeurism, Age Presentation, All kinds of performative self-presentation, Alternate Universe - Edwardian, Alternate Universe - Historical, Angry Sex, BDSM, Consent Issues, Dominance, Down and out in London and Le Havre, Especially when you identify marks instead of making friends, F/F, F/M, Gender Presentation, Humiliation, Jealousy, Mothers and Daughters, bildungsroman, growing up is hard to do, male impersonators, poor communication, vaudeville
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-30
Updated: 2013-06-30
Packaged: 2017-12-16 14:40:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Le Havre, 1908. The Child is mother of the Woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chez les bêtes

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the unplanned Unreal Cities Irene Adler origin story! I am as surprised as you are. 
> 
> I told [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile), during editing, that this thing is "half gothic fiction tropes, half bodily fluids," and if that's inaccurate it's only because I'm forgetting some of the bodily fluids. Put less glibly: there are myriad things here that might potentially be triggering or squicking; tagging them all would give away the entire plot. If you have specific (or general!) concerns, feel free to [email me](mailto:havingbeenbreathedout@gmail.com) or [message me non-anonymously on Tumblr](http://havingbeenbreathedout.tumblr.com/ask), and I would be glad to address them privately.
> 
> There exist portraits of healthy, loving, mutually negotiated BDSM, but this story happens, at least in part, not to be one of them. None of my stuff is written as either a condemnation or a how-to manual; hopefully that comes across in the reading.
> 
> In other news, this takes place in the [Unreal Cities](http://archiveofourown.org/series/24337) universe, but you don't need to have read anything else in it to understand what's going on. If you're willing to accept the idea of "some version of Irene Adler coming of age in the Edwardian era," you will be fine. Also, there is a smattering of French dialogue throughout; it's not vital that you understand what's being said, but if you want to, you can hover over French phrases with your cursor for an English translation.
> 
> Huge thanks to [pennypaperbrain](http://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain/pseuds/pennypaperbrain) for the brit-pick and consultation on horse whips, and, as always, to [greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) for the outstanding beta job as well as the ongoing conversation, cheerleading, and hand-holding as I was writing certain scenes through the cracks between my fingers. And thanks to the whole crowd at Antidiogenes, who cheered me through writing the first scenes of this (in May) and the last (in June).

###  **Normandy, 1908**

Three hours after Irene came ashore at Le Havre there was a pantomime opening at the theatre by the docks, and wasn’t that a piece of luck. _A sign_ , her mother would have said; but Irene, pressing tight her lips, caught herself in time. 

Opening night, with the warmth of summer cooling into evening and the sea salt from the boat’s deck still itching her skin, she strode backstage, trying for _weary, with purpose_. And why not? She wasn't much younger, she thought, than many of the gawky Normans rushing about, sandwiches and scrawled messages clutched in their hands. They exchanged harried looks, so Irene put one on; they raised their voices so she raised hers, while the musicians already in the pit sniped at each other to the screech of strings. The whole place reeked of plaster. Ammonia. Irene faked a drawl like Jean-Louis’s to cover her accent. She delivered four messages and picked two pockets before the curtain rose. At the interval she rushed backstage; unbuttoned tarts from their dancing dresses _vite_ , _vite_ , as fast as her fingers would move. After final curtain the lead actress, bare-breasted, called for Bordeaux; Irene stared too long and the woman curled her lip and dug her nails into Irene’s arm. When the night was over they paid Irene a franc, hard cash. She asked after the cheapest café and they let her have the last of the fish stew, from which all the fish had already been taken. 

Coins in her pocket, what a surprise. She came back the next night, and the next.

The pantomime was the kind of thing that got the penny-gaffes shut down, back home. The first time Irene snuck away after interval and hid herself among the dusty curtains to watch, her whole skin felt hot. The smuggler, finding his Yulka in the arms of her lover, tore her shift from shoulder to thigh. Irene had to look away; had to look back. The mistress was the lithe actress with the cropped hair—the one who had marked Irene with her nails. She stood there with her chin up, bared from breast to hip. When her lord sank to his knees at her feet she was pinned between two lovers, stood taller than either one: the smuggler with his forehead to her stomach, and the intruder, the blonde violinist done up like a man, clutching her hips from behind. Irene shut her eyes. Something ached at the core of her. She was still looking away when the smuggler, gone mad with grief, drove his knife into the table-top through his own knuckles, and the blood ran down onto the floor and his mistress’s hands.

For three more performances Irene didn’t once look away. She might not even have blinked. Her eyes at curtain felt sandy, and raw. 

A week after that the stage bored her; she kept to the wings, and the back doors. If she watched the pantomime all she could think, when Wague stabbed himself, was how he bragged backstage of his pupil Madame Colette to the page girls who’d be scrubbing up the false blood from the stage-boards that night. When he tore Colette’s shift Irene would curl her fingers against the ache of needle-pricks; her eyes swimming with the trick stitching she'd done—she’d do—she was doing, repairing it by gas-lamp; Colette’s scorn still beating in her ears. That first night she’d crossed her legs, hard, to see Yulka’s shift stained with her lover’s blood. Soon enough she was gritting her teeth over the washboard at one in the morning when Colette dirtied the thing, and cast it into her lap.

Still. Coins in her pocket. She came back for the first week of July, and the second. 

On the night of the Bastille Day celebrations all of the audience and most of the cast got drunk on Champagne. Irene drank nothing; cleared a hundred francs in billfolds; gorged herself early on great hunks of fish from the stew; and unbuttoned a tart from her dancing-dress, slowly now, slowly, in a white changing-house by the waves, kissing her neck and her thighs and the tops of her breasts by moonlight as fireworks burst over the sea. 

 

###  **London, 1905**

Irene had left school the year before she started to bleed. There was no other way: her brother was marrying and moving house. Besides, it had been embarrassing, being the only one of her age in Blount Street who wasn’t trying for work. Florence had wanted to keep Irene at home, sharing the window where she hunched over her piecework. When Irene balked at that, Florence had said she guessed Irene (chin up, lips pressed together) might get a place at the match factory. Irene had nodded, once.

And she’d a shrewd eye, had Florence Maguire Adler, never missed a trick; but still Irene had kept up the factory story for months while she scrubbed out the grease-pans down at the Cahill Arms, bringing the dockhands and day-labourers their midday fish and ale, listening to them talk about the world. By the time Florence cottoned on, Irene was bringing home twice what she would have sulphuring sticks all day—which became a convincing argument for staying, once Irene agreed to hand over her whole pay, and not just half. 

Two years in the Arms and her Spanish was passable, her French and German excellent so long as the company was rough. She even had a smattering of Chinese. In September of that year Maria on the night shift got into trouble, then married out of it; and Irene bullied her way into Maria’s place over the protests of Florence Adler and Danny Cahill both. The money was three times as good. The figure Florence heard was "twice." In the Arms Irene wore scraps of lace, wore a silk stuff skirt once owned by a lady.

The marks on Florence’s wall said Irene grew eight inches that year. When she’d started working nights she’d been the favourite of the other girls; a wide-eyed child when she wanted, appearing by their sides with outlandish questions, and imaginary requests, just as the men grew too many hands. In the pub’s back room afterward Irene would stick out her own hand, and the girls would narrow their eyes but more often than not they would put a coin in her palm. 

It was a handy side-line; she tried to make it last. Even when her body lengthened so fast it hurt; even when her hips flared and her chest got tender and swollen. She did herself up younger than she felt; made her eyes wide and blank, like she'd done years before for the harpy from the London City Mission; but soon it only made the men worse. They would turn their gazes to her, pull her into their laps. Talk to her in baby-voices: _blowsy wench_ , they would call her; _petite fillette_. _Careful, my girl, or you’ll show us your money_ , their hands at her petticoats, their breath in her face. Sometimes she could feel them hard in their trousers, through her too-young child’s skirt. 

The first few times she fumbled, shook. Once she was sick in the alley out back, feverish, quiet as she could make it. After that—well. She sometimes thought it was strange (doing the washing-up; mucking out the fry-pans; walking home in the gas-lit drizzle with her shoulders hunched against the cold): how something could be at once heady, and deadly, deadly dull. 

 

###  **Normandy, 1908**

In the backstage kitchen, during the show, Irene imitated the three Parisians for an audience of the cook, and the page boys, and the dancing girls. Gabrielle-from-the-changing-house would yell out requests: Madame Colette, say, before her morning coffee; so Irene would distort her mouth into a grotesquerie of a yawn, menacing the boy nearest her with a curled-up biceps like a strong-man in the circus, making him snort with laughter. The cook, her mouth quirking up, would mumble for Monsieur Wague in bed of an evening: so Irene would droop, doleful, her mouth stretching down at the corners, and would peer about, mooning as if at the empty horizon through opera glasses. The whole room would roar with approval. Somewhere deep in Irene's chest she would feel something give, soften, like loosening a corset just a hair. 

(' _Monthieur Wague avec une belle therveuthe,_ ' lisped Marie-Laure, in the back of the room; and Irene made a special effort with her desperation and her mimed pleading; having daydreamed for weeks, in an idle way, of getting the girl alone under the boardwalk; of lifting up her petticoats, and kissing away her stammering blushes. _You should go to Paris yourself_ , Marie-Laure would tell her then, sounding, in Irene’s imagination, like a Covent Garden flower-girl. _You really should._ _An actress like you._ )

So the Normans laughed at the Parisians, and the Parisians affected not to notice. Or maybe they really didn't. Irene was never completely sure. They were wrapped up in themselves, no question; wearing themselves out. Threadbare Wague, with the shiny jacket-elbows, who shaved twice a day and then spent twenty minutes every evening drawing the smuggler’s stubble on his face with grease-paint, looked forty-five if he was a day; but they said in the wings that he was younger than either of the actresses.

(' _Mademoiselle Claudine à l’opéra!’_ Jean-Pierre would shout, and the cook would mutter _Les amantes de Mademoiselle Claudine, à La Garçonnière_ , and Irene, flushed and wondering over that hard _t_ , would do it, would do it, unbuttoning her top buttons over her slim boyish body to affect décolletage, beaming around as if at a retinue. Turned sideways so her audience could see her hand behind her back, flashing hidden signals at the imagined seats behind.)

Claudine...didn't, surely? She swaggered so on stage, with her horse whip and her wooing violin; but then climbed out of her breeches every night, loosed a fall of bright blonde hair, and scrubbed herself back into softness. Her cheeks shone pink; her eyes were honest-to-God violet. If she hadn’t sworn and smoked and caught Irene out twice picking pockets, she’d have seemed an angel of the hearth. That first night, when Irene had seen Claudine pink-scoured and soft in a white cotton dress, she’d wondered they’d cast her, and not Colette (who did exercises; who had muscles underneath her shift; whose body was taut, and hard) as the male intruder. Irene ought to have realised; she’d already got the marks on her forearm.

(' _Madame Colette avec ses chats!'_ someone said, and Irene was still aping that lady's overblown adoration of everything feline, when Claudine, cutting through the kitchen on her way to her cue, walked in on them all. The cook hissed. Marie-Laure's top lip trembled. Irene raised her chin, expecting to be sacked, but Claudine only narrowed her eyes, regarding Irene for a space of seconds before casually strolling on. Irene watched her go with that soft place in her chest cinching back up, wondering: what would Madame Colette herself have done to Irene, if she had come upon her?)

Colette of the vicious nails, and the bobbed hair. Whose Yulka stood so proudly between her lovers. She told nobody her age, and stared down anyone who asked. She could have been Irene’s older sister, the way she looked. But they said in the wings that she’d been married in the gay 90s, and divorced just last year; and that now she courted scandal hungrily; insatiably; like a drunkard trembling for gin. Of _her_ Irene could believe—.

In the wings before performances Irene watched the woman and rubbed her own arm, her tongue between her teeth. 

 

###  **London, 1907**

The first few times a dockhand pulled her into his lap in her baby clothes, she expected—well. Something, from the other girls. She’d have paid them, even; if there were no way around it. But by the end of that year she was no woman’s favourite; they vanished when she appeared. Shot her nasty looks over the bar, turning up their mouths, wagging their tongues. Even Laura Killian didn't wait for her, anymore, by the back door at closing. It made her chest hurt. She ran a finger under Jean-Louis’s dirty collar and flicked her tongue out to wet her lips. 

He was dull, and bulky. She squirmed until his eyelids drooped, watching his face.

Laura Killian took Irene out back after a shift; lit her cigarette for her and said she’d make her listen to reason. Laura said the girls all saw where Irene was headed. ‘You think fire won’t burn you?’ Laura asked her, so Irene leaned close, made her mouth into the shape of an O with her tongue pulled back like Amidio had taught her, and blew heavy rings of smoke, one through the other through the other. Laura’s face got hard. Florence Adler deserved better than a whore for a daughter, she said. But who, said Irene, ever gets what they bloody deserve?

That night, though. 

Irene got home and Florence was up, with a deep crease between her brows. Irene made tea by touch, in the dark; sat with her mother at the rickety little table, inventing stories about her good friends Lottie and Emma, and all about Muriel who swore up and down that she could make a fine ladies’ hat from a heap of rummage sale leavings, and she would teach Irene to do it, too. The lines softened in Florence’s face, after a time. She lay down on her pallet in her corner of the room. Irene sat up until dawn, smoking stolen cigarettes, looking out at the courtyard in the dark. 

The next week Benjamin Hewitt first came round the Arms, fresh from Liverpool with his crossed eyes and his clerk’s salary. He must have taken a wrong turning, Danny said, to end up here; but Irene walked out with him the next night. 

Benjamin said she was grand. A girl who really listens, he said, though really she’d been making up stories about him in her head, things to tell Laura the next day, and he’d never noticed. For a month he came calling at the Arms on Mondays, when Irene got off at five. Then he came to the Adlers’ on Thursdays, where he was so earnest about his prospects (the most junior partner, he said, was a distant cousin; fifteen years and he might be head clerk), and Florence’s grip so soft as she poured his tea from their cracked old pot, that Irene hardly had to work, to keep a smile on her face. 

He was amusing enough, any given day, and she took to wondering what else she could convince him of, without him noticing. In the end there was quite a list. She kept it hoarded away in her head where it couldn’t be seen: how she had him offering up both their fares to Gravesend for a Sunday excursion on a lark; how he had the idea to protect her, though he met her there near-daily, from everything that went on in the Cahill Arms. How he swore it had been his idea, nicking the cakes from the posh baker’s on Curzon Street. How he’d admit, red-faced and bashful, to having persuaded her to drink wine one night in Regent’s Park; how he thought (she reckoned he prayed for absolution; though she hadn’t swallowed a drop) that he’d got her tipsy. How he would weep if you pressed him; how he’d confess he had talked her, in October, into the back of a hansom cab; how she’d regarded him with wide innocent empty eyes as he’d panted a promise in her ear, and begged her, begged her, and the poor little darling, he would say, she probably hadn’t understood what he’d wanted when he lifted up her skirts and unfastened his trousers, brute that he was, and sunk into her and spent himself, debased. ‘What have you done, dearest,’ Irene had said, after. ‘I’m afraid my good underskirts are ruined.’ He’d given her a whole pound. Sorry, so sorry, searching her eyes. Her _good_ underskirts: as if she’d more than one set! Later she’d laughed at the wash-lines, knickers and petticoats mended and scoured and hung out to dry.

After that Irene felt there was little he wouldn’t believe.

In the end seven months passed while she totted up her list. She spat out her wine. Widened her eyes. Kept her bundle of bank-notes tucked in her stays. Florence was beaming. Irene had a full belly and a panting promise; and it wasn’t so bad, was it? so long as she only thought of today.

For seven months, right on schedule, she bled. 

 

###  **Normandy, 1908**

‘ _Irène, encore les points_ ,’ Madame Colette had taken to snapping, if the stitches didn’t tear correctly on stage. ‘ _Irène c'est foutu, le couteau de Monsieur Wague. Irène_ ,’ and she would grab Irene by the shirt or the hand or the hair, her dark eyes sparking into Irene’s face—always Irene, though there were a dozen others equally at fault, and Colette would sometimes search the whole theatre before she found her quarry and shook her, nails in her neck, mouth up next to her face, spitting about Mademoiselle Holmès’s hair coming loose again, were you dreaming, girl? Were you dawdling? Were you drunk?

Irene seethed.

Why she didn’t flee on any given night, she couldn’t say. Le Havre was dull and provincial; by late July even she could see the season had passed its peak. She had enough cash now for the train to Paris, enough for months in a boarding house while she talked her way into a pantomime at one of the boulevard theatres. She watched the trains and the guests’ motor cars with a restless jumping eye. But instead of buying her ticket she just kept on; kept prowling round after the Parisians, kicking herself, like some cur on a string. 

Wague and Mademoiselle Claudine, on their nights off after the Tuesday matinée, got themselves up in their finery and dropped into the Grand Hôtel; spent what Irene thought must be their whole week’s take on oysters and Sancerre. Irene stood with dew-damp feet in the flower bed outside the big bay window, whence she could watch them at an angle without being seen. Wague, his evening shave just complete, pressed his old tailcoat himself, and always sat on the dark side of the table. Claudine favoured pale blues, pale violets; wore her hair in a messy cloud on top of her head, with golden ringlets loose around her face. She laughed, girlish; whispered at him behind her hand, teasing him with her décolletage when she leaned forward from her tight-laced pastel waist. Wague smiled; blushed; but never leaned forward in his turn, and Claudine would snake her tongue out into the heart of an oyster, and look at him from under her lashes, and then roar with laughter, slapping the table with her palm.

Irene, watching it week after week, imagined slapping them. She would do it hard, she thought, right in their faces. _Why hunt_ , Colette had written, in a stolen letter painfully translated in the midnight kitchen, _if you’ve no taste for meat? Why make a show of your fine bow and arrow, if your arms don’t itch to raise them to your shoulder; to draw back the string until you ache with the holding of it; and then, on a measured breath, to loose your flint into a beating heart?_

Irene blew idle smoke rings, and picked the dregs of Wague’s pocket as he stumbled home. 

She liked best to be in Madame Colette's rooms, the moment after Colette had left. The latch would click and Irene would slink in from the side while Colette's perfume still settled in the air. She would move amongst Colette's things: touching, and tasting; using them in their master’s absence. Irene smoked her cigarettes; hoarded them in her pockets. She stole Colette’s notebooks. She climbed into Colette’s wardrobe; catalogued her waistcoats and her ragged stage corsetry and her lacy Paris knickers. She hid behind the door and listened to the sounds Colette made bathing, her body slopping about in the porcelain tub. She even, wondering at herself, paid Colette’s maid not to throw out the bathwater after, so that when Colette went on stage Irene could slip in and soak. She made it a kind of ritual: opening her shirt to bare first her left breast, then her right; stepping out of her stuff skirt like a warrior, presenting himself for the laying-on of battle dress. She would sink into the water with her eyes straight ahead, unflinching, regal. 

Standing by the tub on the first of August there were voices in the corridor too early. Colette’s, and that of—whom?  Another woman, certainly, though deeper. Older. And Madame Colette, whose voice always crackled and pulsed around the name _Irène_ , was giggling, was—was _simpering_ , Irene thought, with a sick cold reptile feeling at the back of her neck.

There was a thud as of bodies against the wall outside. Irene was still damp, still naked. She backed on bare feet into the wardrobe with her heart beating in her throat. Muffled laughter from outside; the knob rattled. Irene shut the wardrobe doors about herself, as slowly as she could bear. They had been closed when she’d come in, she was sure of it. They were closing now, closing…closed. Breathing through her mouth in the dark, she could still see through the empty keyhole when the door opened at last. 

Colette had roses, red roses in one arm, close to her chest. Their thorns must prick; she hadn’t pinned up her shift. The other woman—stocky; suited; greying at the temples; with a walking stick and a monocle—had her hands inside it, one at Colette’s shoulder and one at the bottom of the rip. _Stitched up for strength_ , Irene thought, stupidly, staring at the woman’s hand where it disappeared into the familiar rent. Stitched and stitched until Irene's first finger was raw. Three kinds of waxed thread, and Irene had bled onto the knots, imagining Colette standing over her, curling her lip. But now—now Colette was blushing, with her eyes closed, and there was a fat tom with her hand so far down the side of Colette's shift that her elbow was probably rubbing in Irene’s dried blood.  

‘ _Chérie_ ,’ the tom was saying, ‘ _mignonne fillette_ ,’ but her accent was a strange, fast drawl; odd in Irene’s ears, so that she could only catch every third word, every fourth. 

 _Mignonne fillette_. Colette was past thirty, she had to be.

‘— _si longtemps_ , _sans mère_ —,’ Irene caught, before Colette, dropping her flowers, collapsed with giggles against the woman’s front. It muffled the tom’s words, knocked her off-balance. She staggered back; sat abruptly in Colette’s straight-backed chair; pulled Colette down onto her lap and kissed her mouth. Colette made mewling sounds. Irene squirmed, her forehead pressed up against the metal keyhole plate.

The tom moved her hands just—just _everywhere_ : the right on Colette’s neck, hair, shoulders, nape, cheekbones, the swell of her breast; her left moving under the shift where Irene couldn’t see except for bulges in the cotton: arse, waist, thigh, waist, the small of her back. The tom’s fingers were blunt but soft; pale; covered in rings. Shocking that something so pampered could look so hungry. And Colette, breaking away, crying out ‘ _Missy_ ’ like she was famished for it (all the air gone, sucked from the wardrobe), but Colette’sown hard little hands weren’t touching. They were drawn up to her chest: fluttering, wing-like, twitching toward the other woman; then, clenching, drawing back. The tom—Missy—made an approving noise; slapped Colette’s arse with her free hand, through the cotton. 

Irene, though half-blocked, could still see the rising flush on Colette's cheeks. Colette turned her face toward Missy’s face, eyes open but butting blindly, begging. Begging. Irene’s knees dug into wood through satin; organza; crèpe de chine; her throat when she swallowed was like glasspaper. Missy had her fingers tangled in Colette's dark curls; pulling back her head and her imploring face. The cords in Colette’s neck stood out. She was straining closer. She wanted, Irene thought, with her brain jamming gears, to be closer. She wanted to be _kissed_. Missy was staring into her eyes, and Colette was staring back, and Irene in her wardrobe saw a scrap of Colette’s pink tongue as it came out to wet her lip. Missy smiled; didn’t kiss her. Pulled back her head.

‘ _Tu me—tu me manques_ ,’ Colette gasped at the ceiling. Word by word: _you are lacking from me_ ; flexing her helpless hands. Colette’s voice like grinding metal, like some void was scraping open inside her, needing to be filled. There was no space in Irene’s chest. Colette, who had dug her nails into Irene’s arm.

But Missy just laughed; said something into Colette’s hair that Irene, trembling, didn’t catch. _Ici_? _Fui_? She couldn’t hear properly with her eye pressed to the keyhole; and with her ear pressed to it she couldn’t see. She was dizzy; she needed to breathe. She needed to—to press her whole body, her naked shoulders and her hands and her hard wide kneecaps, in impossible contortions into the room, through wood and metal and air. 

‘— _Je te touche déjà_ ,’ Missy said, sing-song. I am already—. But Colette pushed her head into Missy’s shoulder like a shy little waif, and mumbled something, high-pitched, into the lapel of Missy’s suit. Not meeting her eyes.

And then Missy turned them both; and it was—impossible. Intolerable. They were faced away from Irene, now; she couldn’t see their faces. She stared out at Missy’s broad back; it blocked all of Colette but her legs, bent at the knees and dangling, girlish, half-covered by the ripped shift, with Missy’s suited arm snaked between her thighs. Irene clenched her jaw. Missy murmured. Colette’s legs spread; her bare toes curled. Irene couldn't—

‘ _Je t’en prie_ ,’ Colette gritted out, loud enough for Irene to hear, and her voice was—the whimpering had been enough, but now she sounded _ruined_. Irene sat back, fast, on her heels on the heap of silk underthings, shocked by the sound of it. Shocked by the swimming sparks that shot up her own spine. Her quim rubbed up against the mounded silk and she nearly moaned. 

It was _horrible_. She bit down on her own hand just as Missy laughed. She felt sick, and hot all down her front.  With her teeth in one palm and the other pressed flat against the wardrobe door, she listened to Colette whimpering and ground herself down—angry, fevered, God, _shaking_ —against the pile of silk between her legs. 

‘ _Oui_ , _fillette_ ,’ came Missy’s voice, shockingly calm and—and close, now; so that Irene, startled, turned her hot face back to the keyhole. They’d shifted back. Back toward the wardrobe, and Missy had—had turned Colette over on her lap, head toward Irene, arse toward the door. Over her knee like a child; flushed up and panting—and Irene tasted salt (was she crying?)—with Colette’s hands white-knuckled on the legs of Missy’s chair. Her shift hiked up now around her waist; Missy with one hand on the nape of her neck and the other disappearing behind her. Into her? Moving? Irene was moving— _moving_ ; could hardly breathe. Colette was crying out. Lifting her splotchy face, gasping. Colette, who had drawn Irene’s blood. 

‘ _Tu veux_ —,’ Missy said, and did something with her hand, so that Colette’s eyes went tight-shut and desperate, and she dropped her head and hunched up her body, helpless, over and over; fingers clutching at Missy’s legs. Irene needed to—she could only see Colette’s shoulders, the back of her head; she needed to see, she needed—that desperate pleading pushing of hips, she needed—

‘ _Je t’en prie_ ,’ Colette was chanting, low, under her breath, as Missy smiled, calm, almost proud; held Colette’s head down with one hand and (but Irene couldn’t _see_ ) fucked into her with the other, ‘ _je t’en prie, je t’en prie_ ,’ squirming and grunting while Irene bit her lip and touched herself and tried to be perfectly silent and—

This was—. 

This was nothing like Benjamin. Nothing like Gabrielle in the changing-house on Bastille Day. Irene’s eyes were wet, her face sweat-sticky and her thighs still damp from the bath, and she was soaking the pile of silk underthings where they rubbed between her legs. _Je t’en prie_. The inside of the wardrobe smelled of Colette, and of Irene. _Je t’en prie, je t’en prie_ , and Missy said ‘ _Oui, ma petite, encore, oui,_ ’ tangling one hand again in Colette’s hair and pressing in with the other _je t’en prie_ , and Colette shouted and bucked, curled her whole body around Missy’s legs while she shuddered, ‘ _Quel sage enfant_ ,’ Missy was saying, hardly out of breath, and Irene’s teeth were all sharp, sharp in her mouth, _je t’en prie_ so she shoved three fingers halfway down her own throat; grabbed great handfuls of silk in the other hand and pressed it against her, inside her, _je t’en prie_ , came hot and shaking with tears streaming down her face. 

 

###  **London, 1907**

‘Oh my dear,’ Florence had said, on the eighth month, her voice breaking. ‘Oh my darling girl.’ 

Holding back Irene’s hair like she had when Irene was an infant, and a child, and a grown-up girl, as Irene was sick into the chamber-pot.  ‘But you’re not to blame,’ Florence said, stroking her back. ‘You consented under a promise.’ And Irene, tired to death, and sick with today collapsing all around her, could only nod.

 _Under a promise_. Florence said it over, and over, and Benjamin said it too, that Thursday when he called and Irene told him what had happened. He blanched, and trembled, and then, with tears in his eyes, he held out his hands to her, smiling a watery smile. 

‘Don’t worry dearest,’ he said. Florence wiped away a tear. ‘We’ll publish the banns. You’ll have nothing to worry about, nothing, nothing at all.’

Irene nodded, dumbly. I’ll have nothing to worry about, she repeated to herself, thinking of the Hewitts’ house in Liverpool, of Benjamin’s respectable rooms in Lambeth, with all their painstaking bachelor comforts. A woman’s touch, he’d said, that’s all it needs: giving her a tentative smile. I’ll have nothing to worry about. Nothing. Mrs. Hewitt had no daughters; she’d twenty pounds saved up against the marriages of each of her sons. Florence took in more piece-work, so as to do her bit; Irene went out dress-shopping alone. Nothing to worry about, she thought. Green, blue, grey. Benjamin was a good man. Sleeves; necklines. Her mother was happier than Irene had ever seen her. 

She walked the length of Cheapside and didn’t stop at a dressmaker out of the lot. She went back the next day, and the next. Peering in the windows; loitering by the doors. ’You take your time, dear,’ Florence said, hunched over her needle. ‘It’s not every day a Maguire gets a new-made dress.’ 

Cheapside; Gracechurch; Aldgate. After a month, with Benjamin badgering her every Thursday and Monday, she told the news to Danny and the girls at the Arms. Bridget smirked, and whispered, but Danny stood them all a round after closing that night, and Laura Killian, giggling and blushing, kissed Irene’s mouth in the entryway as they all said their goodbyes. ‘I knew you’d be all right,’ Laura said. ‘You’ll be all right, now.’ Nothing to worry about, Irene thought. Nothing at all.

Gracechurch; Aldgate; Whitechapel. The jonquils came up, while she walked. Irene was no longer working; no longer sick in the evenings. Florence started fretting, though she never said; so Irene stopped in at the Arms and got the name of Laura’s auntie, dressmaker in Queen Street. Pointed at bolts of fabric, at pattern-books, without looking. Walked and walked. Thought of Benjamin’s washing; Benjamin’s suppers. Benjamin’s flat. Benjamin’s law-clerk friends. Nothing to worry about, now.

Whitechapel; Stepney. It was raining but her shoes were new; warm; gifts from Mrs. Hewitt, they’d come with a note. It had called Irene ‘Beloved.’ Her hat was dripping. She thought of grouse; turkeys; she was heavy, with a tight, tight chest. Stepney Green, where the free clinic had been, when she was a child. She thought of beef, and carrots boiled to pulp. Nothing to worry—Christ, her chest. She had the dress. They’d set a date. She couldn’t—couldn’t breathe. She sat down in the rain; her mother was happy. On the wet concrete stoop, a man in a dark coat and an apron. Was she quite all right? Was she feeling herself? ‘He said he would marry me,’ Irene said, staring into the rain. ‘Please sir. He said he would, and I believed him.’

She swallowed the contents of the paper packet in the chemist’s toilets, and walked the long way round, back to Limehouse. By the time she got there she was soaked, and shivering. Pricking all down her hands, her arms. It was nothing to worry about, she said. Florence was white as ice. Their one set of sheets on her pallet; she was pouring sweat, burning up. Darkness. Florence held her shoulders as she sat up, water tepid in the tiny moveable washtub. Daylight. Dizzy; sick again. Rust taste in her mouth; she couldn’t feel her hands. She was sick in the chamberpot. Darkness. Florence’s palm on her forehead as she bled all over the sheets. She was going to die, surely. Daylight. She had no position; no prospects. The pallet ruined. She’d bought a dress in Queen Street; nothing to worry about. Blood all over. Sitting up in the washtub; biting her mouth to stay awake. Florence holding her up. Her vision gone grey. Darkness. The pallet, stripped. She wanted to peel off her own skin. Daylight. She couldn’t go back to the Arms. To the Hewitts’. She couldn’t stay. Darkness. Sick into the chamberpot. Sick into the washtub. She couldn’t remember food, beer; walking in Gracechurch Street; buying a dress. Daylight. Staring at grey light through the little window. Sweat on her face. Blood on her thighs. She felt light, too light for purchase on the ground. 

And then: how much later? She could tell that Florence was snoring, curled up on a pile of newspapers in the corner. What of the sheets, she’d asked, hours and days ago, and her mother had said, like a dizzy chorus in Irene’s head: Don’t worry about them, dear, not now. But Irene, filthy, unmoored in the midsummer morning, slipping on her old blouse and her stuff skirt, seemed unable to worry about anything else. Her mother's sheets: they dogged her all down the stairs. On the train to Portsmouth; in the dockside boarding house where she washed and washed and slept and got back her strength. On the channel crossing. Right up until Le Havre, and the backstage chaos of a pantomime on opening night.

On her second day in Paris—after the frantic scrubbing of hands; after the hot-faced train ride, four hours to weigh high against horror and decide for the former; after setting her jaw and knocking on an unsigned door down a narrow Montmartre alley; after talking her way into a very particular breed of paying work—she walked into the shining Alexandre Turpault storefront, and spent half her pick-pocketed Le Havre francs on two full sets of linen at the top of their line. She had them lace-trimmed and monogrammed, pressed and packaged. And when she’d sent them off, sans name, sans note, to Limehouse, her feet were once again solid under her, carrying her along.

 

###  **Normandy, 1908**

Missy stayed a week; Irene kept to herself. She didn’t pick pockets, or steal fish from the stew. She felt she was hardly there at all. She felt, indeed, she might go mad. 

She’d collapsed on the pile of silk in the wardrobe, ready to be discovered. But Colette hadn’t come over. Not for a night-dress, or a pair of stockings. Judging from the sounds through the keyhole, she’d been oddly pliant. Perhaps, Irene thought, she was now ashamed; and it made Irene cry harder: hard enough, surely, that someone must overhear. But Missy had only put Colette to bed, gentle, cooing _jolie fille_ , and _mignonne petite_ , in between the wet lazy sounds of lips and skin, which slowed…and slowed. Missy had raised herself from the bed, and tip-toed out the door and down the hall. And Irene, with an itching face and an aching, knotted stomach, had pushed her way with agonising slowness out of the wardrobe. Her clothes had been bunched-up and damp where she’d shoved them behind the tub; she’d stood and shivered, putting them on, garment by wrinkled garment, staring down at Colette’s dark curls, listening to her snore to raise the dead. 

Then Irene had left. Sat on her pallet bed next door, trying to feel glad she hadn’t been caught.

Nothing had _happened_ , she thought, viciously, pinching the skin of her own arms. Nothing had happened. But with everyone, just everyone she met, it was as if—as if something boiled up under her very skin. The cook, passing her backstage, said they missed her little shows in the kitchens; and Irene clenched her fists. It must have showed on her face. The cook’s smile wavered. Dropped. Irene, cheeks flaming, fled. 

Slipping down to the Bassin she passed Gabrielle, wringing her hands, babbling to Mademoiselle Claudine. Something about a place in Paris. Something about all girls I heard, no men allowed unless they’re ones like Missy, oh Mademoiselle Holmès, can one live there and never leave? Simpering as Claudine laughed and shook her head. Irene wanted to be sick. She sat on the docks and threw Colette’s stolen cigarettes into the surf, one after the other after the other. Marie-Laure, seeking her out there as the sun set, reached out a sweet soft hand; patted Irene’s shoulder. Patted her waist, inviting. _An actress like you_. ‘ _Ça va?’_ Marie-Laure lisped, and Irene stood, and showed her teeth, and said ‘ _Tha va? Tha va?’_ until tears welled up in the girl’s eyes, and rolled down her cheeks.  

Why should it be so? Nothing had happened. Nothing. And now she was slipping. Colette hardly said two words to her together. Missy was there, Missy was there, and Colette let herself be led, and Irene couldn’t stop thinking about—but nothing had happened. In the wings stood Wague, always Wague with his turned-down mouth, staring at Missy’s hand on the small of Colette’s back, at Missy’s hand on Colette’s bare shoulder, and Irene thought _je t’en prie_ , and stared daggers through his bloody back. 

She wanted to be gone, now; but she watched the trains leave for Paris, thought of the boarding-houses and the boulevard theatres and felt ill. Watched the boats back to London with a rising panic. She wanted to be gone but she was still backstage in Le Havre, watching Wague watch Missy watch Colette take her bows. If it hadn’t been for him, she thought (pathetic, swooning as he was, always in her line of sight with his slumped back and the bald patch at the crown of his head), she could have almost pretended—.

In a foul mood she prowled and kicked into their dressing rooms, on a night when the other actors had gone. Scowled at all the flotsam of his trade, and Claudine’s. Irene had been, that evening, down to the train station again, and couldn’t make herself leave. He was always, _always_ hanging round. He was hideous; repellant; and indeed, here he came now: trailing in with bags under his rheumy eyes and his pencilled-on stubble for the stage. She smiled with teeth; and after all that, he didn’t even know her name. 

‘ _Mademoiselle…Ysolde?_ ’ he said, just as she said, in English, ‘You think about them, don’t you? Madame Colette and the Marquise, when you watch them from the wings?’ 

Wague drew himself up. Clucked his tongue at her, the _stupid_ little man. She bit her mouth with her eyes wide open.

‘Madame Colette,’ he blustered, ‘is my student. It is only natural I sw—sweet her acting.’

‘Follow,’ Irene said. His eyebrows furrowed. ‘The word you want’s _follow_ —though,' she added,  ' _Délicieux_ , is it? You taste it on your tongue when you see them together? Want to eat them up, do you, you like to—’

 _'Mademoiselle_ ,' he snapped, and she smiled, ' _il faut absolument que tu me quittes, je t'exige_ —' 

‘Sh, oh hush, hush, it’s all right,’ she cooed. And look, how he listened. Like a dog, like a child struck dumb; falling back as she unfolded herself from the chair before his glass. Oh he was hapless; hopeless. Her heart beat in her throat. 

‘It's all right,' she said, swallowing. Advancing. 'I know how it must be. A man like you. Your kind thinks, a beautiful woman you can’t have—’

‘It is not—you do not—’

‘—who you can’t have,’ she said again. ‘What do they do together, hmm? When they’re alone?’

‘I—,’ he said, ‘—you have—sixteen? you—’ 

Forty-five he looked, but she knew those shaking hands. She watched them _tremble_. He tried to stand tall, disapproving; but she narrowed her gaze, straight into his shocked and wondering eyes. 

‘Shh,’ she said again. Walking toward him with her heart beating out of control; her palms wet; herself between him and the closed door. 

‘Such a young, such a beautiful woman,’ Irene said. Sneering into Wague’s face. (His twitching cheek. His tongue working drily in his mouth.) ‘A woman like her,’ Irene murmured, ‘taking up with that sad old tom. Do you think it’s—what?’ 

He made a noise. She brought her hand to his other cheek, harder than she meant. Forcing him into stillness, and oh: wide, wide eyes. His face was sweating under his greasepaint under her palm. Her fingers itched with it.

‘Disgusts you, does it?’ she hissed. Spat a bit in his face and her stomach leapt when he flinched. ‘Makes you angry? You think: what does she have that you don’t? You think: you’re ten times the actor that old bluestocking is. You think: why couldn’t it be you? Buying her flowers? Feeding her oysters? You with all your filthy parts,’ and Irene’s thumb caught, harsh, dragged down his bottom lip as he shuddered, ‘up inside her, in the morning?’ 

His mouth, stretched. His gusting, panting breath across her thumb. 

He tried to say—something. Wrongfooted, searching for words, struggling to speak with his lip trapped. Like a horse for inspection in the auction-yard; the whites of his eyes. But after all, he’d brought it on himself. Looking like a kicked dog; boring all the dancing girls with his boasting. Mooning about after Colette when she never even noticed him; it was pathetic, she thought, repulsive it was, and then she—

Christ.

Stumbling back. Wague shocked; frozen. She’d—with her free hand she’d reached up and she must have—must have struck him. Struck his face. With an open hand, her palm still stinging. And her arm aching; and her shoulder; white greasepaint on her palms, what had she done? Backing up toward the door, she had to get her breath, keep her head; had to run; and then he—

He _moaned_. Soft, quiet; but he did. It took the floor out from under her. 

She stood and stared and he swayed on the spot. Closed his eyes. Where she’d smeared the greasepaint off his face she could see him flushed up a dull red. His hand hovered in air, halfway up to his cheek. He wasn’t moving. He was breathing so hard. 

And then at once she was—was a torch. A riot. Every fierce and burning thing. 

She shot across the little room at him; pushing him back toward the vanity, and he went: stumbling, unresisting. A grin like panic coming up on her face, what was she doing, she had to look round, she had to see. She swept a hand across the top of the vanity: scattered paint tins; scraps of white, of black and gold; a shrivelled rose, and a porcelain vase in shards on the floor as she turned him, shoved him face-down across the desk. 

Tongues of fire; shaking fear. Christ, what was she—hitting a man her father’s age, backstage in a foreign theatre. Breaking his things, thinking of—of Missy’s roses, of Colette’s silk camisoles, and the way Wague bloody _looked_ at them both. She was sprawled halfway over his back and wanting to—to—

But Wague was grunting now, under her hands; his eyes open, head to the side and a trail of drool from his mouth to the painted wood. He reached for her behind him, struggling, and she didn’t want—had to get him still, swaying; moaning like he’d been when—so she clambered up behind him. Pinned his hands at his sides with her knees. Shoved his face into the wood and his whole body went slack. His hips twitching just a bit, just a tiny bit; his prick trapped (must be), like his face, against hard wood.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you poor child,’ the words spilling from her throat. Sitting up, her weight on his hands. ‘You poor little _brat_ ,’ and reached behind herself to spank his arse through his trousers. He made a slurping, gasping noise against the wood; now she was steady. Pushed his head down hard and let it up so he’d do it again, and he did. Christ. Again. Her breath, hard in her lungs. 

‘If you’re—,’ she started. Stopped for air, swallowing giggles, horror-struck. She scrambled half-off the vanity, but still the words came; she couldn’t stop them. She hit him with her hand and said, ‘If you’re very good, you know, I can show you.’ 

Then held her breath. How Colette had moved, red-faced and gasping over Missy’s knee. 

And had he even understood her? He was writhing, now. Trying to get his bony arse back up against her thighs through his trousers and her stuff skirt. She had his left knuckles pinned to the table with her bare knee hard on his palm, her hips twisted back, not letting him touch. With her left hand on his right forearm she made a claw. Dug in her rough-bitten nails.  

He moaned again. That quiet, that overwhelmed sound, Lord. 

He didn't answer, though, and it took the edge off her horror. He didn’t have much English. Perhaps she could—if it wasn’t in French. Do whatever—. She hit him hard through his trousers and he bucked his hips into the vanity, bloody Christ. She was already hitting him, holding him down. She could say—

‘Will you be good for me, then?’ Slowing her breath, in her throat. Translating in her head. Missy had—had barely been winded. ‘Darling girl, do you want—,’ looking around the room, searching, swift, with her kneecap grinding down into his palm. Paint-pots; chemises. Face rags and hair-rollers. Claudine’s horse whip. 

She laughed out. He made that slurping sound against the wood. _Je te touche déjà_. 

‘You want me to touch you, darling?’ she said. She heard Limehouse in her voice, thicker than she’d ever put on at home; no doubt he understood nothing. He was shaking. Christ, she wanted him to—to beg; to cry. Tears and drool all over the vanity when Claudine came in tomorrow.

‘But I _am_ , little bob-tailed wench,’ she heard herself say. ‘I am, I’m touching—touching you, already. You need me to, with your knickers down? You need me to—?’ She laughed, wrong-pitched, wild; and hit him, hit him again with her open hand. His knees gave out so his weight was all on his stomach, on the vanity; his feet dangling like Colette’s had dangled, kicking useless against the floor. She reached between his legs; made a guess and grabbed hold hard; her fingers tightening into a fist. Wool-wrapped flesh in her palm, off-centre; only one of them, but—

‘ _Dieu!_ ’ he cried. He sounded like he was breaking. She laughed, and _squeezed_. His breath. He had no breath. She let go and he made a sound that was almost— _almost_ , she thought, almost—

She ground her knee into his palm; pushed both his arms to the table: _stay_. He nodded, nodded, nodded. His eyes wide and watering as she scrambled off and leaned down to his ear: ‘Take up your skirt up for me, tart,’ pushing his hands under his hips. Fasteners; flies. She was light-headed; he was fumbling; whining. ‘Get your knickers down, little dear, little darling,’ and he shoved his trousers to his knees.

Christ. She wanted to _mark_ him. She kissed each trembling cheek, bringing up gooseflesh with a teasing tongue—the sounds he made, they heated her face—and then slapped them, neatly, like an afterthought, as she pulled away toward the wall. 

Shook her head; flying. Drunk, she felt; and reeling with it. The whip against the wall, with its frayed leather braid and its taped-up handle. _Je t’en prie._ She snapped it against her own thigh; closed her eyes; breathed deep. 

She turned; opened her eyes again, and Wague was—was just where she’d left him. It opened up her chest. His arms at his sides like she’d tied them there; legs pinioned by trousers. Pale arse-cheeks bared to the room, gooseflesh raising the greying hair onto its ends on his bottom and his back. And his mouth, open. Panting softly; like he didn’t—didn’t want to make a fuss. 

‘Oh,’ said Irene. 

Skin loose on his bones, hairy, pale; and his wrinkled hanging bollocks. He was ugly to her. And yet. 

‘Such a sweet little miss,’ said Irene, trying for steady breath. She made her voice warm as she could; the fine edge of anger disguised. ‘Such a clever girl, waiting here so long.’ 

She thought of Colette, convulsing; Colette, turned soft and pliant. She didn’t believe she’d made a sound, thinking it; but as she did, Wague trembled. Almost too quiet to hear, Wague whined.

 _Si longtemps_ —

‘So long,’ she said, standing to the side of him now, trailing the whip-end along his half-bared back; along his crack and the insides of this thighs. Mesmerised, as he struggled to hold himself still. 

‘So long,’ she said again, ‘without anyone to look after you. Such a pretty little girl.’

He was panting harder, now, but still quiet, so much quieter than Colette had been with Missy. With his face turned to the side against the vanity she could only see one eye; but it was so wide there was a full circle of bloodshot white around the watery blue. Her tongue felt huge in her mouth. She’d held him down; slapped his face. She tapped his inside thigh with the whip and he gasped and _yes_ , that was—. More. More.

‘You like that, _fillette_?’ and she saw him start at the word in his own tongue, so she hit him inside the other thigh, harder, as hard as she could. Which wasn’t very. She grit her teeth. She couldn’t get leverage like this with his legs just barely apart and trapped by his trousers. He made, still, a high-pitched pleading noise. 

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you do, don’t you? You like me to,’ and she pulled away, brought the thing straight down on his back. Clumsy; clumsy; it flopped and skittered; she wanted to feel it through her arm. And _he_ wanted— ‘You like me to take up your little skirts,’ she said, ‘in front of everyone,’ aiming the whip across both buttocks now, ‘and show them your money?’ 

And she hit him twice with the thick middle of the thing, hard where his quivering arse met his thighs. One after the next, no time for breath between, so that he cried out, wordless, curling his body into the wood of the vanity. _Oui_ , she thought, unthinking; _encore ma petite_ , and did it again; again; again. ‘You should be careful out at night,’ she said, ‘with a purse like that,’ and he was crying and shuddering and not moving away, not moving away, and oh, Christ, she thought, _plus_ _encore, encore._

She stopped at last, gasping for breath. Looked down at the mess of him. She’d got her wish, exact: there he was, sobbing, forehead to the vanity-top, rope of drool from his open mouth. Humping his hips against the side of the furniture. A thick stripe was coming up angry pink across his arse, and in the middle of it a thin arcing line of red. She reached out, mesmerised, with the whip; touched it to his bleeding skin.

‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Hush, now.’ She smeared faint red trails down the backs of his legs. And the insides, the—pushing the blood, gentle, with the leather, into the sweat-damp clenched insides of his thighs. There was a knot in her throat. 

‘Little dear, getting herself so excited,’ said Irene, and then: ‘don’t worry, darling. Not now. There’s nothing to—.’ She swallowed. Wanted to hurt him closer. With her hands.

So she drifted up behind him. His skin under her fingertips, hot and swollen; he moaned. Twitched forward his hips, and she stroked him, soothing. She thought of Benjamin: wet, when she’d reached a curious hand inside his smalls. Wague was quieting now. She slapped him once, curious, and he hiccuped and cried. 

‘ _Les petites fillettes_ ,’ she said, ‘can make such a mess.’ She reach round him on the side where she’d been standing; slid a palm down his leg and around, and he hunched his hips, desperate, toward her hand—but she ran it down the side of the vanity instead. That was wet, too. Slicked to dripping from where he’d rubbed up against it with his prick. 

‘Such a mess,’ she said again, into his ear, her hand back on his hip. ‘So hard to take care of them, the little angels.’ She slapped his arse again, bare-handed. 

‘Can you help me, _chérie_?’ she said. ‘Can you use my hand if I just—,’ and she moved one hand back in front of him, knuckles against the soiled wood, and slapped him again, hard, on the arse with her other. He jerked forward. When his bare flesh was pressed into hers his movements doubled, trebled; he was making frantic crying grunting noises, rutting himself madly into her unmoving palm. She slapped him again; and again; his whole arse was hot, now. There was no space between his moans and she snatched her hand away. 

‘ _Supplie-moi_ ,’ she said, _beg me_ , and he could have obeyed any way, with any words, but beautifully, magically, he said it, sobbing it out over and over as she wrapped her fingers firm around his cock and he curled, immediate, around her fist, pumping warm and wet all over her hand and her arm and the painted wood vanity, sobbing: _je t’en prie, je t’en prie, je t’en prie._

Afterward. Blazing lights, all shut off at once. Her arm filthy to the elbow and her skirt stained with a strange man’s blood, she staggered back from him under the weight of it. He looked around, dazed, his face tear-streaked and blotchy. ‘ _Je_ …’ he mumbled, but couldn’t find more words. She stumbled back another step. Another. He shifted; tried to get to his feet, but his legs wouldn’t hold him. He fell on the floor with his trousers about his ankles and his eyes all vacant and on his left hip—she hadn’t seen, she’d hadn’t—ugly and open, was a scarlet gash, where the whip had wrapped around. Her stomach dropped; she stared. ‘ _Je_ ,’ he said again, but she didn’t want to hear, what had she—

She turned tail, and ran.

  

###  **London, 1902**

Irene, in plaits and a grubby pinafore in St. James's Park, had commandeered Bess Hodge’s skip-rope; and was tying Bess to the railings with it, when Bess’s brother Jack ran straight into her side.

Bess struggled, and squealed in her high, piping voice, though Jack, wide-eyed, was already sprawled on his bottom on the pavement. They looked silly, Irene thought. _She_ hadn’t said a thing, though it was her Jack had collided with, and not Bess at all.

‘You following me, then?’ Bess said. Jack shook his head. He got up, sulky, and tried to whisper in his sister’s ear, but she screwed up her face and squirmed her face away. So Irene made Jack tell her, instead. 

He told her there were fine ladies, hiding in the arbour. _Ladies?_ Here? Yes, said Jack, two of them. All in black, he said. Writing in notebooks. With great _hats._

Ladies, Irene repeated. Thinking: here was something more interesting than having to give Bess back her skip-rope. So she made Jack stay with Bess while she walked in a wide circle around the arbour; shimmied up a tree; scooted far out on an overhanging branch and lowered herself down, slowly, slowly, onto the roof of the thing, until she could make out a whispered word, the corner of a feathered hat.

‘Isn’t it scandalous,’ Irene heard, from under one of the plumes. The other hat shivered its feathers. 

‘Shameless, just _shameless_ ,' it said, 'parading around, naked as the morning,' though when Irene, curious, squinted out to where the woman must be looking, it was only Mary Macallister in her regular Sunday shift. Not naked at all. Irene frowned, chewing a hangnail on her thumb. 

‘—no mystery why they marry so early,’ one hat was saying, while the other clicked and clucked and Irene put her hand over her laughing mouth, ‘living all crowded together as they do,’ with a little shudder, ‘like _animals_ ’ and then lowered her voice too far for Irene to hear, however hard she pressed her ear to the gaps between the wooden slats of the arbour. There was low murmuring between the women; a rustling, a trembling of feathers; and then a low, half-smothered gasp that Irene thought sounded like nothing so much as—

‘—with their own _brothers_?’ the listener choked. The speaker said ‘Oh! Oh, Harriet, your salts,’ drawing back enough so that Irene could see, down between the hats, that the woman’s hands, which rummaged and rummaged in a large handbag and then drew out a bottle, were actually—Irene blinked—actually _shaking_. 

The hats sniffed, and snorted. They rose toward Irene and she held her breath; the one woman dusted off the other and chivvied her along, chatting into her ear as they bustle toward the embankment, leaning on her shoulder, patting her shaking hand.

 _Why_ were they shaking? Irene wondered, pulling herself back up to the branch above her head. Old Mrs. Brown’s hands shook with palsy; and Mr. Hannigan’s shook with drink; and when Florence had got the telegram about Irene’s father, there had been a tremor in her hand until she’d hugged Irene hard enough to make it stop. Irene, dropping from the tree, wandering off by the water, forgot all about Bess Hodge, tied to the railings with her own skip-rope. Why would a fine lady look at plain Mary Macallister in her Sunday shift, and make a sound like drowning?

Irene couldn’t think.

But a month later, when the London City Mission sent a dour old lady with a gold eyeglass perched on her beak, to harry Mrs. Hodge and Mrs. Franklin about the mess their children made; and scold Mr. Harrison about taking a drink; and to quiz Florence Adler on the last time Irene had been to school—to church—to the clinic down Stepney Green, until Florence got a horrible reedy sound in her voice; something rose up inside Irene. It stopped her thinking. She stepped out from behind the changing-screen in just her chemise. Looked the old bat in the eye and knew what it was made that lady’s hands shake, beneath the arbour in St. James's. Irene could have laughed. 

‘You needn’t worry,’ Irene had said. ‘My brother goes to school.’

(Dylan Adler had gone into the glass-houses at thirteen, when the telegram had come. Twelve-hour days, six-day weeks, and for a year and a half he’d done nothing in the Adlers' house but fall half-clothed into a stuporous sleep. Then his mate stumbled, right in front of him, burned off half his face in the furnace, skin peeled back right down to the bone, and the only time Irene had ever seen her brother’s hands shaking she was waking him from a night terror, his eyes wide and horror-struck, and deathly, deathly afraid.) 

Irene yawned, scratching her bottom, looking into the staring eyes of the woman from the London City Mission. ‘He teaches me everything he learns,’ she said. ‘At night, you know. After we put out the lights.’

 

###  **Epilogue: Paris, 1911**

_‘Oui oui, merci_ ,’ murmured Claudine, absently, handing her francs to the foreigner in the doorway as Eva said ‘What, aren’t you _coming?_ ’ lapsing into frustrated English, and Natalie, in painful earnestness: ‘I feel, just—torn, in my soul, coming to such places.’

‘Oh come _on_ ,’ Eva said. Natalie lingered in the alleyway; Claudine leaned against the jamb. ‘Renée would never want you foregoing such an invert’s paradise on her account,’ Eva said, tugging on Natalie’s white-robed arm. 

‘ _Elle l’adorait ici,_ ’ Claudine put in. Natalie looked pained.

‘She could never let go of this—this idea of sapphic decadence,’ Natalie said. ‘Sapphic _violence_ , when really it’s the most peaceful, the gentlest thing in the—’

‘Oh tosh,’ Eva said. ‘I’ve danced in your faerie-circles. And _you_ , my dear, have never been able to let go of your absurd penchant for rescuing women from their own folly with the power of your— _parts_ ,’ and she gestured, vaguely, to Natalie’s hips under the voluminous white draperies. 

Claudine snorted. 

‘I thought _you_ didn’t understand English,’ Natalie complained. But she let Eva take her elbow and pay her entrance fee with the woman at the door. 

‘It’s only,’ Natalie sighed to Eva, as the crowd noise built along the narrow passageway, ‘one feels, doesn’t one, that so much has changed, has passed, irretrievably. Liane, married. You, married, and whisked off to Lord only knows—’

‘It’s Athens, for Christ’s sake,’ Eva cut in. ‘You may have heard of it. The cradle of Western civilisation.’

‘—and Renée,’ said Natalie, her voice still, after a year and a half, almost breaking. ‘Dead.’

Eva pulled her chair close to Natalie’s chair; put her head with its burnished upswept cloud on Natalie’s shoulder. She sighed.

‘I know,’ Eva said, and moved her head, and kissed Natalie’s shoulder before resting her temple on it once again. ‘I know. But look, duckie, I’m back in Paris for two days at the outside; Claudine’s been gone for a year; and this La Fillette or whatever she calls herself—well, everyone, just everyone down to the man-hungriest Newport housewife is saying she’s not to be missed, even if you don’t _follow her backstage_. So let’s just—,’ and Natalie’s hand came up to stroke absently over Eva’s hair, ‘—let’s order our drinks, and—mmm. Say, what did you want to cure _me_ of, anyway? Years ago?’

Claudine, smiling, lighting a cigarette, let her mind wander as Natalie said _oh_ _we were children_ and _you were perfect, darling, perfect_ and Eva said that wasn’t how she remembered it, and pinched Natalie’s knee. They were charming, of course; it wasn’t that Claudine wanted them gone; it was only…it was always such a joy, such a visceral _joy_ to be back in Paris, after she’d been away. There was a familiar taste about it; a loosening of the muscles in her shoulders and her face, that she could feel the moment she stepped off the platform at the Gare de l’Est. 

She took a drag; breathed in. Around her the cadences of Paris rose and fell. Sitting in cafés in the Alexanderplatz, or the Piazza Navona, she would start in surprise, thinking she’d heard someone say—oh, _la mère du fils de mon cousin_ ; some haphazard phrase; _la femme la plus têtue_ —only to realise, a moment later, that it had been a trick of the ear: that the words were German, or Italian, and that her mind had shaped their sounds into a false resemblance. 

Here, though, as she smoked and smiled and Eva teased Natalie about leading Paris in fashion—for indeed, Scheherazade had played at the Garnier in Claudine’s absence and everyone was wearing tunics, now, just as Natalie had done for years—this, tonight, was old Parisian French. Claudine, with her eyes closed, could hear the Burgundy cottage of the woman behind her: two years she’d spent in Paris at the outside, though she tried to appear urbane; but the tom to her other side, who talked only of horses, had been born in the Marais. 

She knew these things without conscious effort. It was, she thought, casting about lazily for a metaphor, like slipping into a warm bath; or like that first day of real summer, when a woman could sit on her balcony in only a shift; or lie in bed, naked, with all the windows open, and be caressed by the air like a lover. It had always been so, coming back to Paris. She remembered returning home after her first trip away from the city—with Natalie, as it happened. They’d sipped Chinon and acted out Sappho in the Loire. She remembered her last homecoming, three years ago, after that strange summer in Normandy when Colette had been head over heels for the Marquise, and Wague had woken Claudine at two o’clock in the morning, smarting from a beating by a fugitive stage hand. 

Claudine’s cigarette had burnt down to her fingers. She opened her eyes to see Eva half in Natalie’s lap, sucking on her friend’s bottom lip. Well. No woman was really _married_ when she was sitting next to Natalie Barney in La Garçonnière. From the orchestra pit a mediocre soprano in a block-print kimono was singing one of Claudine’s mother’s old songs. ‘L’Opprimée,’ it was. Claudine sipped her Bordeaux. Caught Natalie’s eye over the top of Eva’s head. Grinned. 

The soprano dipped into a valley from a trembling high note, then stilled into silence. Applause filtered up through the barroom chatter. The singer bowed, and left the stage, and the orchestra struck up a sinister roll of drums. In the seat next to Claudine, Eva detached herself from Natalie with an air of palpable excitement. Even Natalie, though she bit her lip, directed her eyes toward the curtains as they lurched apart.

A mocked-up park; a park-bench. Across the boards strolled a ‘man,’ an ageing tom in a summer suit and a straw boater, whistling, with a cane. He looked this way. He looked that. He ogled a group of white-clad schoolgirls, far in the distance of the painted-on backdrop. He leaned against a tree; wiped his brow. With broad comic gestures he glanced back at the school outing, and undid his flies. 

Beside Claudine Eva giggled; Natalie pursed her lips.

From the wings on the other side emerged another young girl, clad in the same short white dress as her painted contemporaries. She was watching the tom, but he didn’t see her; she circled around him, curious, impish, with her back to the audience, and her long dark hair curling down her back. She crouched behind the bench. He was moving his hand, staring in the other direction. She slipped behind his tree. He was writhing dramatically; contorting; speeding his movements to climax. She laughed behind her hand, her face hidden by a bonnet. And at the last moment, just as one thought he must burst—she reached around, quick-quick, grabbed both his hands away from his flies, and pinned them in front of her behind the tree.

Claudine snuck a look at Natalie, who had her fingers to her chin. Eva was rapt.

On the stage, the tom’s captor did a full-body giggle, face still obscured by her bonnet. His wooden prick stood out proud from his trousers. He squirmed and kicked; the horns in the orchestra wailed his distress. The dark-haired schoolgirl held his wrists with the hand away from the audience; groping, comically, with the other over his bound breasts and his wide curved hips, and then happening upon his cock as if by chance. She gave it a few experimental pumps. He twisted his hips, trying for more. She drew back her hand, miming scandal, one hand over her mouth. 

The tom managed, at last, to get a hand round the back of the tree; to tear the girl’s bonnet from her head. She stilled, at once. She became stiff, all her limbs clenched in fury. She stamped her foot; her long ringlets bounced.

Then she was moving round the other side of the tree, peeling a switch off the side of its trunk. She shoved the tom toward the park bench, kicking him, punching him. She got him there and took down his trousers; bent him over the side of it, with his arse toward the audience. She sat astride his back, holding him down, with the switch in her hand and her face to the room, and—

‘Lovely, isn’t she?’ Eva murmured, but that’s not why Claudine had gasped.

Claudine sat with her mouth open, almost laughing. The girl smiled thin and slow at the audience. She looked up at the sun; down, with distaste, at her squirming quarry, and unbuttoned her white dress all down the front with the switch still in her hand. _But that was_ , Claudine thought, _that was_ —as the girl shrugged off her frock and, with a curious, cruel expression, started whipping the tom on his bare and flushing arse. 

At last Claudine _did_ start to laugh. Her stomach clenched, silent but mad, tears running down her face in the smoky room. 

‘What is it?’ said Natalie, concerned, leaning over with her hand on Claudine’s arm. ‘Are you all right? Do you—do you need to go?’

‘No,’ Claudine gasped. ‘I’m—fine, just. This girl. This is someone I once—,’ and was wracked again by laughter. To think of Wague’s mournful little face as she’d daubed at his buttocks. After all this time.

At the front of the room the former stage hand whipped her quarry; showed her teeth. Eva squirmed; her hand squeezing her own thigh in rhythm through the fabric of her dress. Natalie pursed her lips and Claudine, at last, managed to quiet herself. She leaned close to Natalie and whispered, in her ear:

‘My friend. I believe not so much passes, as you might sometimes believe.’

 

 

###  **Notes**

  1. The title is from Colette's short novel _La paix chez les bêtes_ , or roughly _Peace among the beasts_. It's actually pretty funny the degree to which I could have appropriated almost any of Colette's titles for this story, to wit: _The Vagabond_ , _My Mother's House_ , _The Pure and the Impure_ , _The Tender Shoot_ , _Retreat from Love_ , _The Ripening Seed_.
  2. The summary is an adaptation of William Wordsworth's famous line from "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold": "The Child is father of the Man."
  3. Georges Wague and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette were both real people. Wague was Colette's acting teacher in the wake of her divorce from her first husband. She rapidly became much more famous than Wague, due not so much to her talent as a mime as to her daring and savvy sense for what is now called "publicity"; to her love affairs with people of both genders; and also, incidentally, to her writing talent. In 1908 her series of four Claudine novels were already famous--and had been made into a hit play, and even merchandised—although unfortunately for her, they had all been published under her ex-husband's name.
  4. Claudine Holmès was also technically a historical person, believe it or not. She is not just some crazy Doyle-Colette composite. Her role in this series, though, and basically her entire character, are invented. And that’s all I’m saying about her at the moment. ;-)
  5. What the characters here call a "pantomime" is a drama done in mime, not the contemporary UK usage of musical-comedy stage productions struck up at Christmas. The pantomime in the story (which was scandalous even by Parisian standards) was called _La Chair_ (The Flesh). Colette and and Wague wrote it together, then toured with it very profitably for four years, on and off. It was largely as described, except that Christine Kerf played the role I gave Claudine. In the summer of 1908 the threesome were indeed performing it, and Missy did actually visit, although they were in Picardy rather than Normandy; I shifted them a few miles north in order to give Irene a handy port of arrival.
  6. Colette's extremely high-born stone-butch lesbian lover is historical as well: Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belbeuf, who went by Missy, provoked a full-on theatre riot at the Moulin Rouge by appearing with Colette in a racy pantomime at which the de Morny coat of arms was displayed over the entrance. Missy was older than Colette, and their interpersonal dynamic was at least somewhat as described. From a letter Colette wrote to Missy early in their affair: 

> If the rocking of your arms doesn't suffice to calm me, your mouth will become fiercer, your hands more amorous, and you will grant me sensual pleasure like a form of succour, like a sovereign exorcism of the demons within me: fever, rage, uncertainty...You will give me pleasure bending over me, your eyes full of maternal anxiety, you who seeks in your impassioned friend the child you don't have.

  7. A number of details in the flashbacks are taken from Françoise Barret-Ducrocq's _Love in the Time of Victoria_ , which is a great resource on working-class sexual mores in 19th-century England. (Spoiler: they were not the same as those portrayed in Victorian novels by and for the middle class.) Barret-Ducrocq argues that among the poor of London, throughout the 1800s, sex before marriage was well within the bounds of respectability, even an expected part of the courtship ritual, as long as it was done "under a promise," meaning that the man had voiced his intention to marry the woman. Even then, the rationale seems to have been more pragmatic (she will be supported if she gets pregnant), than any belief that a woman would be "ruined" once she was no longer a virgin—that kind of thinking was more common in the middle and upper classes.
  8. At the turn of the century abortion was illegal in England, and punishable by penal servitude, but any any number of poisonous substances were discreetly advertised as abortifacients in the papers and at the chemist's. Barret-Ducrocq again: 

> A study published in 1825 lists among other methods bleeding and taking emetics, cantharides (Spanish fly), mercury, powdered savin and juniper essence. In the mid nineteenth century colocynth, quinine and a concoction of gin and gunpowder were added to the list. Pills containing lead enjoyed a brief vogue around the turn of the century.

  9. The detail of the do-gooders hiding in the arbor to observe the debauchery of the working class is, hilariously, true, and also taken from Barret-Ducrocq: 

> Another group of missionaries, doing similar research at the Red House near Vauxhall Bridge, testified after lurking in an arbour for a couple of hours: [There was] a company of young persons of both sexes: their conduct and conversation was disgusting.

Unlike the conduct of spying on people from arbors, which is of course not disgusting at all.
  10. The lesbian-BDSM-brothel-fronting-as-vaudeville-theatre La Garçonnière is invented. But it's absolutely probable that such a place did exist, given the enormous breadth and luxuriance of the Parisian sex industry at the fin de siècle. Unrealistic middle- and upper-class expectations of decorousness within marriage, low pay and grueling hours for non-sexual women's work, and the general decadence of the city at the turn of the century, created a perfect storm of supply and demand. Thurman writes: 

> At the fin de siècle, there were approximately a hundred thousand Parisian prostitutes serving a population of slightly under three million. The great bordellos, like The Sphinx, were pornographic theaters offering lavish spectacles to a heterogenous audience that sometimes included children. The morals of milliners,… or of herbalists, … were suspect because so many _boutiques à surprise_ were in fact fronts for freelance sex work. Child prostitution wasn't outlawed until 1909, and girls as young as eight or ten circulated in the café-concerts and the brasseries, ostensibly selling flowers, but in fact offering themselves to men and women equally. Lesbian prostitutes cruised the Champs-Élysées. [...] Destitute provincials wrote desperately to Paris madams, begging for a situation.

So Irene would have had stiff competition, talking herself into a job at such a place. But I think we can all believe she'd be up for it. (Also, regarding the name: androgynous women and lesbians at the time were often referred to as "garçonnes," a feminization of "garçon," or "boy.")
  11. Lastly, if you haven't read anything about the social circle surrounding the sexually voracious femme lesbian American heiress Natalie Barney in the years bracketing WWI, I would _highly_ recommend it. Eva Palmer-Sikelianos was also a real person and one of Barney's first lovers.




End file.
